Cardiff University School of Journalism has written up the 'House History' project launched by one of the residents groups trialling the Chimni Community Web Template  - Bedford Park Residents Association (BPRA) in West London.  The project is helping local community members to research their own ‘house histories’ and providing chimni logs to capture the information. The the CUSJ 'Centre for Community Journalism' became interested because the project uses a content collaboration between the Residents Association and local video-news site The Chiswick Calendar - which sets out to be a cultural magazine for the Chiswick area - to promote the project and related local history events. Interesting stories and people, like the one below with Francis Oliver, are being collated into a series of companion videos by The Chiswick Calendar.

  

  Example History Video from The Chiswick Calendar

The project is the first market roll-out for one of the 'fun' functions of the Chimni concept - the Home History logs.  These are templated feature areas in a Chimni log which can help a user capture and present their home histories - see illustrations below. The users are being instructed in the best practice for researching the social history of their houses and the resulting house histories will then be uploaded to the householders trial Chimni-log.  The public pages from these logs will be collated into a wider online resourcewith a dedicated site, open to the local community.

ChimniHistoryOverview

ChimniHistoryTimeline

 

 

 

 

 

Images From The Chimni House History Logs

NLAArchitectureImageNLALogoChimni Project Lead - Nigel Walley - presented the Chimni concept at the New London Architecture breakfast session 'Smart Thinking For London's Homes'. The talk focussed on how smart technologies will change London’s homes; how can technology make homes in the capital more efficient in terms of their design, their management, performance and use, and how they are planned for?

Nigel Walley followed a presentation by Ben Derbyshire of HTA Architects, outlining the Home Performance Labelling project which seeks to set a standard for house performance data that can be applied to all new home sales. Nigel Walley made the point that, in the emerging Smart Home world, it was important to put homeowners and tenants in control of the data about their home.

PMurrayNLALaunched by Peter Murray, the Chair of New London Architecture (see picture right), the session was intended to highlight new thinking around the way homes are constructed, monitored and managed in London. Alongside the Chimni and HTA presentations, the session saw presentations from Rupert Green, the Smart Design Lead, at architects Parsons Brinckerhom and John Nordon Design Director of sheltered housing specialist PegasusLife.

  NLANigelWalley

The Chimni presentation focussed on our central idea that the home is the most imporatant 'data generating node in a consumers life'. We described the need for a core 'Property ID' that can sit at the centre of a home's digital life. This Property ID is concept is supportive of the government's National Open Property Gazetteer project, proving a digital, web-friendly addition to the OpenData scheme.  Nigel Walley showed how the Chimni project was also supportive of the Home Performance Labelling project outlined by Ben Derbyshire. He showed how Chimni actually went much further, providing a broad data framework for the consumer that included all the data sets envisaged by the HPL, along with a significant extra data formats that underpin the Chimni service delivery.

 

B4H logoChimni has joined the Government's BIM4Housing Initiative intended to help the housebuilding industry in the UK adopt new Building Information Management techniques*.  BIM4Housing is a cross-industry group open to all organisations involved in the design, construction, management and delivery of housing, both private and affordable. Membership of BIM4Housing is reflective of the sector, involving clients, contractors, consultants, suppliers, subcontractors and other interested bodies. Chimni has taken on the challenge of representing the end user, the homeowner in deliberations with the industry.

 

*BIM Building Information Management is a new generation of Computer Aided Design (CAD) software that encourages architects to incorporate intelligent, 'Smart' data in construction models.  The Government believes that it will deliver significant efficiency gains to the housebuilding industry which can help them hit the goals for home creation in the coming years. For Chimni it could provide the raw data input to create Chimni logs for all new homes constructed.

GlebeWebsiteA new residents association - the Glebe Estate in Chiswick, London - has joined the Chimni Residents's Association trial programme. Its new web site - www.glebeW4.org.ukk - is the latest to use the Chimni Residents template that is one of the core distribution vehicles for the wider Chimni initiative.

Note On The Residents' Association Template Trial

The Chimni Residents' Associatoin Template is one of the key distribution mechanisms for Chimni Property accounts. Chimin are recruiting 10 REseidents Associations in West London to trial the template and its hyper-local publishing system. They will be reporting back on their use of the template in mid 2015.

 

BedfordParkSiteBedford Park was the first 'garden suburb' and it is impossible to follow any history of British house building or UK architecture in general without stumbling across references to it.  Sir John Betjeman, who founded the Victorian Society, called Bedford Park “the most significant suburb built in the last century.”  Having redefined how we were to live in suburbs in the 19th and 20th century, Bedford Park is now joining an initiative to redefine how we manage our homes in the 21C.

As the next Residents' Association to join the Chimni Residents Trial they join Stamford Brook in the experiment to define how communities will manage themselves in the connected 'Smart' age.  For more information contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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